The Belzec Death Camp

by Chris Webb

  After about twelve minutes it became silent in the chambers. The Jewish personnel then opened the doors leading outside and pulled the bodies out of the chambers with long hooks. To do this they had to put these hooks in the mouths of the bodies. In front of the building they were once again thoroughly examined and the bodily orifices were searched for valuables. Gold teeth were ripped out and collected in tins. These activities were carried out by the Jewishcamp personnel.

  The bodies were taken from the searching area directly and thrown into deep mass graves which were situated near the extermination institute. When the grave was fairly full, petrol—it may have been some other flammable liquid—was poured over the bodies and they were then set alight. I had barely established that the bodies were not completely burned when a layer of earth was thrown over them and then more bodies were put into the same grave. During the disposal of the bodies I also established that the whole procedure was not entirely satisfactory from the point of view of hygiene.[83]

  What is questionable is the date of the visit as recalled by Wilhelm Pfannenstiel—the trip to Treblinka on August 19, 1942. From the testimony by Josef Oberhauser, Wirth went to Treblinka with Odilo Globocnik to see for himself the chaos that Dr. Irmfried Eberl had allowed to develop. Oberhauser accompanied Wirth and Globocnik, supporting Wirth in his new role as Inspekteur der SS-Sonderkommandos Abteilung Reinhard. Another extremely important flaw in Kurt Gerstein’s account is that he saw a gassing facility with eight chambers. At that time there was only the three chamber gassing facility in August 1942; the new gas chambers construction was only started when Wirth and Stangl were at Treblinka.

  This would either indicate that either Gerstein and Pfannenstiel made more than one trip to the extermination camps, or the visit was later, either September or October 1942. It is known that Pfannenstiel was indeed in Lublin in September 1942. A German police message decoded by the British Intelligence Service at Bletchley Park revealed that Ernst Lerch, Globocnik’s adjutant, had to provide a car for him on September 30, 1942.[84]

  *

  At virtually the same time as the visit of Kurt Gerstein and Wilhem Pfannenstiel in one of the transports from Lvov (Lemberg), one of the few survivors from the Belzec death camp, Rudolf Reder, arrived at the camp. We owe a great debt to Reder for writing down his experiences of Belzec—almost a unique account of what life and death was like in this man-made hell. During the month of August 1942, the killings reached a frenzied peak, with 50,000 Jews murdered at Belzec between August 10–23, 1942. Mass deportations from Krakow between August 25–30, 1942, saw 14,000 Jews murdered. Other large scale deportions from Drohobycz, Przemysl, Tarnopol, and Krakow district added to the death toll. So to provide the clearest picture of what happened to all the transports during August 1942 and beyond, we will use extracts from Rudolf Reder book Belzec to cover his transportation, arrival, and initial stay in the death camp:

  Reder recalls the start of the deportation from the Janowska camp in Lvov:

  At six in the morning they ordered us to get up off the damp grass and form up in fours, and the long rows of the doomed marched to the Kleparow station. Gestapo and Ukrainians surrounded us in tight ranks. Not a single person could escape. They herded us onto the ramp at the station. A long freight train was already waiting just pass the ramp. There were fifty cars. They began loading us. The doors of the freight cars had been slid open and Gestapo stood on both sides, two on each side with whips in their hands beating everyone on the face and head on the way in.[85]

  The convoy of death reached Belzec:

  About noon the train reached the Belzec station. It was a small station. Little houses stood around it. The Gestapo lived in these little houses. Belzec was on the Lublin-Tomaszow line, fifteen kilometres from Rawa Ruska. At the Belzec station the train reversed from the main line onto a spur that ran another kilometer, straight through the gate of the death camp. Ukrainian railroad workers also lived near the Belzec station, and there was a small post office. An old German with a thick black mustache got into the locomotive at Belzec—I do not know his name but I would recognise him in an instant—he looked like a hangman.[86] He took command of the train and drove it right to the camp. It took two minutes to get to the camp. The German who had driven the train to the camp got down and ‘helped’. Shouting and lashing out, he drove the people from the train. He himself went into each car and checked whether someone remained there. He knew all the tricks. When the train was empty and checked, he signalled with his flag and drove the train out of the camp.[87]

  The Reichsbahn official was Rudolf Gockel. Teo Pansera, a Polish Volksdeutscher who worked for the Ostbahn in Belzec, recalled in an interview on July 12, 2000, that the German station master Gockel attended his wedding uninvited, “sitting like a lord” on the first cart, with his pressed uniform and his handle-bar mustache—a sight to behold.[88]

  Rudolf Reder remembered the first moments at the death camp:

  The train pulled into a yard about a kilometer long and wide, surrounded by barbed wire and iron fencing, one atop the other, two meters high. The wire was not electrified. You drove into that yard through a wide, wooden gate topped with barbed wire. Next to the gate stood a hut where a sentry sat with a telephone. In front of the hut stood several SS-men with dogs. When a train had passed through the gate, the sentry closed it and went inside the hut.[89]

  Now the SS-men took control of the transport:

  Several dozen SS-men opened the cars, screaming “los!” They drove people out of the cars with whips and rifle butts. The cars had doors a meter above the ground, and all those being herded out, young and old, had to jump. They broke arms and legs during this, having to jump to the ground...... Aside from the SS, the so-called ‘Zugsführers’ were on duty. These were the supervisors of the permanent Jewish death crew in the camp, dressed normally without camp insignia.

  The sick, the old and the small children, all the ones who could not walk on their own, were placed on stretchers and set down at the edge of enormous dug graves. Gestapo–man Jirmann[90] shot them there, and then pushed them into the grave with the rifle butt.[91]

  The next part of the process was where the SS announced to the new arrivals that they needed to take a bath, all done to allay fears and stop resistance from occurring:

  Jirmann spoke very loudly and distinctly. “Ihr gehts jetzt baden, nachher werdet ihr zur Arbeit geschickt” (Now you are going for a bath and afterwards you will be sent to work). That was all. Everybody cheered up and was happy that they were going to work after all. They applauded.....

  The whole crowd moved on in silence, the men straight through the yard to a building on which it was written in large letters: ‘Bade und Inhalationsraume’ (Baths and Inhalation Room). The women went some twenty meters further to a large barracks, thirty meters by fifteen. The women and girls had their hair shaved off in that barracks..... later on I saw that only a few minutes later when they were given wooden stools and lined up across the barracks, when they were ordered to sit, and eight Jewish barbers, robots silent as the grave, approached them to shave their hair down to the scalp with clippers.[92]

  Now the doomed women and children took their final journey:

  I stood off to the side, in the yard, together with the group picked out to dig graves, watching my brothers, sisters, acquaintances and friends being driven to their death. While the women were being herded forward, naked and shaved, whipped like cattle to the slaughter, without being counted, faster, faster,—the men had already died in the chambers. It took more or less two hours to shave the women, which is also how long it took to prepare for the murder and the murder itself.

  Several dozen SS-men used whips and sharp bayonets to drive the women to the building with the chambers and up three steps to the gangway, where the askars counted 750 people into each chamber.... I heard the doors closing, the moans and the screams; I heard the desperate cries in Polish and Yiddish, the bloodcurdling laments of the children and the women, and t
hen one joined, terrifying cry..... That lasted fifteen minutes. The machine ran for twenty minutes and after twenty minutes it was very quiet, the askars opened the doors from the outside, and I together with the other workers—picked out like me from previous transports, without any tattoos or insignia—we went to work. We dragged the bodies of people who had still been alive not long ago; we used leather straps to drag them to the huge, waiting mass graves and the orchestra played during this, it played from morning to evening.[93]

  Rudolf Reder was able, through his book, to shed some light on the social activities of the camp staff, once the daily tasks of exterminating thousands of innocent men, women, and children was concluded for the day:

  No one from the families ever came, and none of them lived with a woman. They raised whole flocks of geese and ducks. People said that in the spring they were sent whole baskets of cherries. Crates of vodka and wine were brought daily...... Each Sunday evening they summoned the camp orchestra and held a drunken party. Only the Gestapo got together, they gorged themselves and drank. They threw scraps of leftovers to the musicians.[94]

  The Trawnikimänner also enjoyed socializing, and they had a recreation center—a small bar called the Komadowski Bar—on the same side of the road as the Kommandantur and SS NCO living quarters on Tomaszowska Steet.

  Chapter VIII

  Jewish Work Brigades

  Unlike Auschwitz-Birkenau, with its massive slave-labor force, the Jews selected to live and work were a small fraction of those deported to the death camp. In the first phase of the camp’s existence, the Jewish work brigade consisted of 100–150 men. In the second phase, a total of 500 prisoners in Camps I and II were utilized, the vast majority of this number employed on removing corpses from the gas chambers and burying them. There was also a small orchestra.

  From the initial transports, Christian Wirth selected between 100 to 150 Jewish men to form various work brigades; they were used to unload people from the cattle cars, collect together their luggage, another work brigade to drag the bodies out of the gas chambers, then throwing them into the tip-up trucks, in the early phase, and bury them in mass graves.

  Another work brigade took the collected luggage and belongings of the victims to an abandoned locomotive shed near the Belzec station. In this building, everything was sorted and stored prior to shipment to the main Aktion Reinhardt depot on the Alter Flugplatz in Lublin, which was near the Lublin concentration camp.

  Once a transport arrived at Belzec, it was met by SS guards, Trawnikimänner, and Jewish workers under the supervision of the so-called Zugsführers—these were the Jewish supervisors of the permanent Jewish work brigades. Jewish prisoners helped with the undressing, and eight barbers were employed to shave the women’s and girls’ hair before they were gassed in the chambers. The men had been gassed first. A small team of dentists, armed with pincers, extracted gold teeth from the corpses.

  Rudolf Reder recalled the living quarters for the work brigades:

  In the camp there were two barracks for the death crew, one for general workers and the second for the so-called skilled workers. Each barrack held 250 workers. The bunks were two-level. Both barracks were the same. The bunks were bare planks with a small tilted board under the head. Not far from the barracks stood the kitchen, and further on the warehouse, administration laundry, stitching workshop, and finally the elegant barracks for the askars (Trawnikimänner).[95]

  Chaim Hirszmann, deported with his family from Zaklikow in early November 1942, recalled how he was selected to work as a barber, and among those who emptied the gas chambers; he testified before the Jewish Historical District Commision in Lublin on March 19, 1946:

  The train entered the camp. Other SS men took us off the train. They led us all together—women, men, children—to a barrack. We were told to undress before we go to the bath. I understood immediately what that meant. After undressing we were told to form two groups, one of men and the other of women with children. An SS man, with the strike of a horsewhip, sent the men to the right or to the left, to death—to work. I was selected to death, I didn’t know it then. Anyway, I believed that both sides meant the same—death. But, when I jumped in the indicated direction, an SS man called me and said, “Du bist ein Militärmensch, dich können wir brauchen” (“You have a military bearing, we could use you.”)

  We, who were selected to work, were told to dress. I and some other men were appointed to take people to the kiln. I was sent with the women. The Ukrainian Schmidt, an Ethnic German, was standing at the entrance to the gas chamber and hitting with a knout every entering woman. Before the door was closed, he fired a few shots from his revolver and then the door closed automatically and forty minutes later we went in and carried the bodies out to a special ramp. We shaved the hair of the bodies, which were afterwards packed into sacks and taken away by Germans.

  The children were thrown into the chamber simply on the women’s heads. In one of the ‘transports’ taken out of the gas chamber, I found the body of my wife and I had to shave her hair. The bodies were not buried on the spot, the Germans waited until more bodies were gathered. So that day we did not bury.[96]

  Rudolf Reder recalled how the money and valuables were collected and sent on from the death camp:

  Valuables, money and dollars were taken out of the storehouse each day. The SS-men collected it themselves and put it into suitcases which workers carried to Belzec, to the headquarters. A Gestapo officer went first, with Jewish workers carrying the suitcases. It was not far, only a twenty-minute walk, to the Belzec station. The camp in Belzec, that is, the torture chamber in Belzec, was under this headquarters. Jews working in administration said that the whole shipment of gold, valuables and money was sent to Lublin, where the main headquarters was, with authority over the Belzec headquarters.[97]

  Reder continued his account:

  The torn clothes of the unfortunate Jewish victims were collected by workers and carried to the warehouse. There were ten workers there, who had to unstitch every piece of clothing very carefully, under the supervision and whips of the SS, who between themselves divided up the money found…. The Jewish workers sorting and unstitching the clothing couldn’t misappropriate anything, and didn’t want to.[98]

  Chaim Hirszmann told his second wife Pola about his experiences at Belzec, and she later recalled:

  The prisoners were constantly beaten and every day many of the workers from the regular staff were killed. Typhus was prevailing, but one had to avoid admitting the disease. The sick were murdered on the spot. Getting medical treatment or lying down was out of the question. Sick with typhus and with a fever of 40 degree Celsius, my husband worked and somehow managed to conceal his conditions from the Germans……….

  Two Czechoslovak Jewesses were working in the camp office. They too, had never entered the camp. They even enjoyed a certain freedom of movement. They often went with the SS men to town to arrange different matters. One day they were told that they would visit the camp. The SS men showed them around the camp and in a certain moment they led the women to the gas chamber and when they were inside, the door closed behind them. They finished with them in spite of the promise that they would live.

  The Germans ordered the prisoners to set up a football team and on Sundays games were being played. Jews played with SS men, the same ones who tortured and murdered them. The SS men treated this as a matter of sport, and when they lost a game, they had no complaints……. There were also women employed in the camp, but their number was much smaller than the number of men. There were no children at all. Women worked. They were selected from the transports.[99]

  Reder described the workers who toiled in the extermination area of Camp II:

  I belonged to the permanent death crew. There were five hundred of us all together. Only 250 were ‘skilled’ workers, but of these 200 worked at jobs for which they didn’t have to be specialists: digging graves and dragging corpses. We dug the pits, the enormous mass graves, and dragged the bodies. Bes
ides doing their work, the skilled workers also had to take part in this. We dug with shovels and there was also a machine that loaded sand and lifted it above ground level. The machine threw the sand out at the side of the grave. A sandpile formed, which was used to cover the graves, when they were filled with corpses. About 450 people were always occupied with the graves. It took one week to dig one grave.

  Reder remembered the brutal guard Heini Schmidt, a Volksdeutsche, who supervised the grave diggers:

  We were watched all the time we worked by a thug named Schmidt, who beat and kicked. If someone was not—in his opinion—working quick enough, he would order him to lie down and give him twenty-five lashes with the whip. He ordered him to count, and if he miscounted he gave him fifty instead of twenty-five. Fifty was too much for any tormented man to bear; the victim usually dragged himself to the barracks and died the next morning. This happened several times a day.

  Also thirty to forty workers were shot each day. The physician usually submitted a list of those who were exhausted, or else the so-called Oberzugsführer, the main foreman of the prisoners, produced a list of ‘offenders’ so that thirty or forty died each day. They were led out to a grave at dinnertime and shot.[100]

  He also recalled the tasks of the work brigade who had to remove the dead bodies from the gas chambers:

  Aside from digging graves, it was the task of the death crew to pull the corpses out of the chambers, throw them into a high pile, and then drag them all the way to the graves. The ground was sandy. It took two workers to drag one corpse away. We had leather straps with buckles. We put the straps over the arms of the corpses and pulled. The heads often got caught in the sand. We were ordered to sling the corpses of small children over our shoulders two at a time and carry them that way. We left off digging graves when we dragged the corpses….. we had to work that way from early morning until dusk. Dusk ended the working day, because the ‘work’ was done only by daylight.[101]